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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956774">unraveling</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia'>intimatopia</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro Has A Palace, Angst, Character Study, M/M, References to Suicide, Unreliable Narrator, aftermath of 11/20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 00:40:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,384</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27956774</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“When do I get to get away?” Akechi whispered.</p><p>Laughter, again. <em>When he lets you.</em></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>99</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Quality Persona Fics</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>unraveling</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2LFirx2IybrCMt7NIiV1hC">title song</a>
</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It had been a long time since Akechi had mourned someone.</p><p>His hands, usually steady, shook as he pushed open the door to the apartment he lived in. Sometimes he slipped up and thought of it as <em>his</em> apartment, but it wasn’t. His father had bought it for him, which meant it was still his father’s. No place could be trusted, nowhere was safe.</p><p>He smiled all through his nightly routine, a fussy little thing carefully crafted for the cameras planted in the mirrors and crannies of his apartment.</p><p>Already the Akira in his head was fading. He couldn’t recall the precise shade of Akira’s eyes, or the curl of his hair, or the way that grin cut across his face.</p><p>Blood ate through the memory like rust. Blood remained.</p><p>He took off the gloves and washed his hands and put the gloves back on, movements slowing despite his best effort to the contrary. His only comfort was that his father rarely bothered actually watching the footage he collected, and that Akechi had smashed the cameras in the bathroom, but that didn’t mean Akechi could get complacent.</p><p>Slowing down was complacence. He had a plan he knew so well he didn’t have to remember it. But even walking to bed took a long time, like every step happened through drying cement.</p><p>On some level Akechi knew he was mad. Loki’s sword cut both ways. Every mental shutdown and psychotic breakdown ate through the fabric of Akechi’s own consciousness, leaving wide holes. There’d been a person where he stood, once, but now he thought he was just a weapon that’d draw blood without aim or grace if anyone put him down.</p><p>Loki never put him down. His father didn’t put him down either. In hands like those, why did he need Akira at all? </p><p>In the brief moment of sanity before his mind clipped through Mementos into the freefall of apathetic sleep, he remembered. He’d hoped Akira would piece him back together. The thought was gone too quickly for the irony to set in—how could he hope for someone as broken as Akira to fix <em>him</em>?</p><p>In his dreams, Mementos was haunted by ghosts. Desire didn’t end where people did. In his dreams, he found himself and tore his own heart out.</p><p>He woke up in the throes of panic, pressing the heel of his hand against his chest and gasping for breath. Loki’s laughter echoed in his mind, the screeching throb of it rendering impossible the formulation of a course of action. So he surrendered to the panic, curling into a loosely-folded comma of a boy.</p><p>Akechi could blame Loki for this part all he wanted, but some madnesses were inherent to the corpse he dragged around and passed for a person.</p><p>He'd held it together in Sae's palace. Wielding Robin Hood undid some of Loki's damage, or at least provided a mask not fully rotted out on the inside. An illusion that could stand up to the piercing scrutiny of those godawful grey eyes. Robin Hood had been<span>—what had it been? Akechi barely remembered. He barely remembered anything, these days. Better that way, not knowing what he was losing even as his spine cut into his missing heart.</span></p><p>Dull in the aftermath, he stumbled back to the bathroom for tap water. His body felt strangely hot and feverish, decayed and sluggish. He was too tired to consider whether the Phantom Thieves knew this side of power—probably not. The palaces of dead people didn’t vanish as fast as one would hope they did. They lapsed into ruins, numb and quiet and overgrown with the weeds of cognition. Without their owners’ desires to power them, they sat in the cognitive universe like the empty shells of long-dead sea creatures, beautiful and lifeless.</p><p>In some of them, their owners’ bodies lay where he’d killed them, bodies twisted as they had been at the moment of their death.</p><p>The worst palaces were the ones of the people who’d suffered shutdowns or breakdowns instead of death. Their palaces were haunted, their shadows broken and twisted by their madness. They begged to be saved when he walked through, and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do for them except kill them.</p><p>He chose that way out sometimes. When Loki was feeling particularly antsy or merciful.</p><p>Why was he thinking about this now?</p><p>Oh, right. His own palace. The one Akira would never be able to make it through, even if he'd been alive or had ever shown the remotest inclination to try.</p><p>He’d been in there once. That funhouse of mirrors, broken glass slicing into his feet and every shadow in his own shape. He’d lost his way on the first floor, crashed himself through glass so many times he’d bled out enough for Loki to finally pull him back to the real world and let him sleep it off. Still had the scars on his hands from all those shattered mirrors. The symbolism of it would’ve made him retch if he wasn’t sure he’d swallow glass if he opened his mouth in there.</p><p>God, he’d stood in the bathroom for nearly ten minutes, slouching against the wall. Pathetic, pathetic. He’d come in to take a shower, hadn’t he?</p><p>His hand slipped turning the water on, and he cried out vaguely when the icy water fell over him. He stripped out of his dampening clothes, tearing his gloves off with his teeth and locking the door behind him.</p><p>Maybe the shower ran for a long time. He didn’t know; the water was too cold to breathe inside, and it was too dark to see. Good for losing track of time, and thinking about drowning himself. He thought about drowning himself a lot. His father’s palace, a ship, had put the idea into his head.</p><p>Or had it been there long ago? He had vague memories of a couple of laughing children holding his head under in a bathtub.</p><p>After he’d killed Wakaba, he’d tried to kill himself. It was surprisingly easy to google combinations of over-the-counter medications that could kill him in sufficient doses. He’d calculated it precisely right, and still woken in bed with a gnawingly empty stomach and a painfully sore throat, horribly scared and horribly <em>alive.</em></p><p>He died in palaces, and Loki put him back to bed. He died in Mementos, and Loki brought him back to the gates. He died in his apartment, and he woke up where he’d fallen for the most part.</p><p><em>Why can’t you just let me go?</em> he remembered screaming.</p><p>Laughter.</p><p>It bubbled up inside him now, high-pitched and crazy, so like Loki’s the sound unnerved him even as it made him laugh more. His shoulders shook, from the cold and from the bone-dry humour of it all. He wrapped his arms around himself, futile effort at self-control, and only managed to gouge scratches into his sides.</p><p>Another startling moment of clarity, the interrogation room a bright spectre against the black curtain of water that hid him from the world. The cold blank look in Akira’s eyes, not just lifeless but <em>un</em>alive, a ghost.</p><p>That shade of grey, all common and all wrong.</p><p><em>You let him get away from me,</em> Akechi thought. <em>You got away from me. Again.</em></p><p>
  <em>What am I doing wrong?</em>
</p><p>He didn’t know who he was talking to. He knew they were there, on the other side of whatever prison Akechi had been born inside. Loki, his father, Akira. Puppet-masters, all of them, their strings tearing through Akechi’s body and intention and <em>mind.</em></p><p>He felt along the wall for the faucet, turning it blindly off. The sudden lack of water pressure left behind the ache in his head and the burn in his eyes, like he’d stood too close to the sun.</p><p>“When do I get to get away?” Akechi whispered.</p><p>Laughter, again. <em>When he lets you.</em></p><p>A flash of silver-steel grey. <em>You haunt me more than anybody else I know,</em> Akechi thought. Was this still madness? Did it matter? He always talked to Akira like he was being heard. Akira, who was only a boy, and <em>yet.</em> All that bleached-broken glow. He lit up the backs of Akechi's eyelids like a snuffed match. <em>I haven't killed you, but you're still a ghost.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/_intimatopia">twitter</a> / <a href="https://ciaran.tumblr.com">tumblr</a> - come talk to me about this sad fuck-up boy. comments are loved and appreciated!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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